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Search Month: April 2008 Search News, In Review

Search Month is a
monthly newsletter that recaps stories covered onSearch Engine Land over the past
month. It’s also available by feedhere. Below, news
about Search Engine Land itself, then our 10 most popular stories from April
2008, then a major story for various search topics along with other stories
related to those topics since our last monthly newsletter through today.

READER SURVEY RESULTS: Thank you everyone who took our reader survey.
It helped us learn things like that 1/3 of you have been in search marketing for
more than 5 years, 37% work in-house, 32% work for an agency, and other fun
facts. You can see more of the results in ourpost about it.

SMX ADVANCED SELLING OUT! This June 3 & 4, ourSMX Advanced conference
returns again to Seattle. Last year’s event sold out just before the event
happened. This year, a month from the show, we’ve sold 75% of our capacity
already. Don’t wait — if you want to go, book this week to both save on the
registration and to ensure you can get a ticket.

If you’re an experienced search marketer, SMX
Advanced is the event for you. This intimate, cutting edge two-day event
features sessions addressing issues that you won’t find discussed anywhere else.
Check out the agenda for the complete list, including Blow Your Mind Link
Building Techniques, Bot Herding Conversion Optimization: Winning After They
Arrive, Buying Sites For SEO, and Give It Up! — the session where leading search
marketing pros reveal their most closely–held secrets and techniques.

Along with two-day organic SEO and PPC tracks, we’ve added specialty programming to SMX Advanced. The SEM Business track has sessions that will help SEM business owners
and managers be more successful. And, the Developer Day track will dive deep on
SEM-friendly development techniques and tactics.

We’re also very pleased that Microsoft’s Kevin Johnson and Google’s Matt Cutts
will be featured presenters at SMX Advanced. See the links below for more
information about their appearances and the show in general:

SMX LOCAL & MOBILE COMES IN JULY! Our show focused on local and mobile
search, SMX Local & Mobile, comes to San
Francisco this July 24 & 25. The full agenda is now up, so check out the range
of sessions in these hot areas and register to attend!

MORE SMX SHOWS! Aside from the shows above, here are other SMX events
on the calendar, for those doing forward planning:

SMX & SEARCH ENGINE LAND SOCIAL OPTIONS! Remember, a good way to keep up on all of these events is by reading theSMX
Blog. You can also socialize in a variety of ways:

Facebook SMX Group:
Has links to all the official SMX events pages on Facebook.
You can also meet others who have a general interest in SMX or have attended
one of our events this way. There’s also the
Facebook SMX Fan Page. In addition, Search Engine Land has both afan page and agroup on
Facebook.

Yahoo Upcoming SMX Group:
Network with others interested in SMX events, plus easily jump to the official
events pages on Upcoming from here.

========================================Top 10 Most Popular Stories: April 2008========================================

1) Twitter Wrote
This Column For Me – By now you have probably seen a bunch of talk
about Twitter. And after all of this talk you might be still thinking: OK, so
what the heck is Twitter really and why should I care? How is it going to help
my business at the end of the day? Rather than writing this column myself, I
decided to let Twitter (or more specifically, my extended Twitter network)
write it for me. This is me on Twitter (feel free to add me). So let’s get
started… The best way to demonstrate the usefulness or power of something is
to show real examples. I started this experiment at approximately 5:20 PM EST
on Monday afternoon. Within 1 hour, I had over 80 different replies that
answered all of my questions and more. Within 1 hour I had reached out to
people from all over the world and they had reached back. It all started with
this simple question: "How would you describe twitter in 140 characters or
less?"

===================

2) Google Now Fills
Out Forms & Crawls Results – One of the biggest search challenges has
long been that the major search engines like Google cannot crawl material that
can only be retrieved through the use of forms. Now Google is filling out
those form to obtain the information previously hidden, the company has
announced.

4)Why Mixx Hasn’t Gotten
The Following It Deserves – Yet – Mixx, a social media submission
site, is a newcomer on the scene, so it understandably will take a while for
it to catch up with older sites like Digg, Propeller, Reddit, and StumbleUpon.
That said, this article looks at the current state of Mixx and the potential
future of its small but devoted community. This might come as a surprise, but
Mixx serves approximately 500,000 unique visitors per month and is breaking
their engagement record every month, even though the site is barely 6 months
out of its private beta. One of the reasons for this is that so much of the
activity takes place in the form of conversations (in the private groups as
well as user-forums) that isn’t reflected in the metrics.

===================

5) A Small
Business Marketing Success Story: John Tuggle, Guitar Teacher – A
small business can have millions of dollars in revenue and dozens of employees
… or it can be a one-man-band, turning passion into a living. This month’s
small business marketing success story is about the latter. Meet John W.
Tuggle, a guitarist living in Athens, Georgia. John has been playing guitar
for 17 years, and giving private lessons for 14 years. Like many music
instructors, John put his knowledge into a "how to" book and built a web site
to sell it. That was about two years ago. After 18 months of struggles (he
thinks he sold five books), John was ready to give up teaching; he was going
to play gigs and be a studio engineer.

===================

6)Google Gets Whois
Answers In Search Results – Looks like Google’s gained a new direct
answer service, whois information for domains. Enter a query like whois
searchengineland.com, and you’ll be told when the domain was registered and
expires, along with a link to more information from the Domain Tools site.
Here’s a screenshot:

===================

7) Link Development
Tool Shortcuts For Firefox – A few weeks back I did a post on my blog
about creating Firefox quick search bookmarks. I was surprised at how well
received it was, though I think people were most pleased with the fact that I
had created a download of a very small selection of the large list of SEO
related Firefox quick searches that I use.

===================

8) "Previous Query"
Refinement Coming To Hit Google Results – Yesterday (technically still
today my time), I did a keynote interview with Google vice president of search
products & user experience Marissa Mayer during our SMX Sydney show. We
covered a wide range of topics, including how "Previous Query" refinement will
soon come to natural listings on Google, plus how Australia is to get
StreetView mapping, Google testing how well Yahoo monetizes, how Orkut might
have to be replaced in the US, and other topics.

===================

9)Tools For Engaging In
Social Media – We all know Social Media Marketing can be pretty time
consuming. There are numerous social media communities, each requiring you to
sign up, make a profile, and participate, in order to have any success with
them. So it is only natural that you would like to have some helpful tools to
short cut the process wherever possible. Below we will go through each of the
major social communities that I use and outline some of the best tools to help
you manage and maintain your accounts.

===================

10) How Flash Can Be
Search Engine Friendly – For a long time there has been a tug of war
between developers and designers who love to use Flash and SEOs who know how
bad Flash can be from a search engine crawler perspective. The designer wants
the beauty of an all Flash site. The SEO wants to bring the site traffic. It’s
a tough situation, but there are ways to implement Flash and still provide
something for the crawlers to chew on.

============================
B2B============================

Leveraging PR To
End The B2B Content Development Struggle – One of the biggest
challenges B2B clients grapple with is content creation. Developing material
that is fresh, relevant, and keeps users coming back—while also being SEO-friendly—can
be difficult. This is a problem. Fortunately though, there’s an easy and
effective solution. And it’s closer than you might think. See also:

Google Sued For
Undesired AdSense Inclusion – Google is being sued by a man
represented by a law firm that has successfully sued Google several times in
the past. The firm is Kabateck Brown Kellner and the man is David Almeida, a
local businessman from Massachusetts who claims that Google’s sign up process
for AdWords wrongly conceals that advertiser text ads will run on AdSense
content partner sites unless they affirmatively opt out. See also:

Google Showing
Ranking Scores On AdWords? – This morning I reported at the Search
Engine Roundtable that several webmasters began noticing three values being
displayed under some AdWords ads that might reveal some details on how Google
may rank AdWords ads. The scores include the "Pscore," "mCPC," and "thresh."
Danny and I took guesses at what each might mean and the mCPC seems likely to
be the minimum cost-per-click for the ad. Thresh might refer to a threshold
score for if or where the ad displays, while the Pscore might be a Google
quality score metric of some sort – we guess. See also:

Google Website
Optimizer Steps Out Of The AdWords Box: Open To All Users & Urchin 6.0 Comes
Out Of Beta – Google has announced that AdWords is no longer a
requirement for Website Optimizer. In fact, you can now go to google.com/websiteoptimizer
and register for free to use Website Optimizer, even if you do not have an
AdWords account. Now, you can use Website Optimizer to not just A/B test your
AdWords landing pages, but also test your Yahoo landing pages, your banner
landing pages, and different elements throughout your web site to improve
conversions and desired actions from your users.

Google Loses PR
Chief Elliot Schrage To Facebook – It’s going to be harder for Google to
spin they haven’t lost the mojo to Facebook with news of the latest exec to
depart the Big G — that being chief spinmaster Ellliot Schrage bailing from
being vice president of global communications at Google to become VP of
communications and public policy at Facebook. See also:

Google Adds
Street Views To Step-By-Step Driving Directions – The Google LatLong
Blog announced that you can now see street views turn-by-turn (when available)
when you are seeking out driving directions via Google Maps. For example, when
driving from the Empire State Building to Times Square, you can see that
Google has street views available for every turn. A camera icon next to each
step of the directions is available to click on. Clicking on the camera shows
you Street View imagery for that turn. See also:

Google News
Makes Quotes More Discoverable – The Google News Blog announced that
they will now display quotes within articles when they think your query and
the content warrants it. For example, a search on Google’s CEO, Eric Schmidt,
returns a quote at the top of the Google News search page. See also:

Sitelinks On A
Google Minus 60 Result: What Does It Mean? – Last week, I covered an
interesting observation at a Google Groups thread, where some individuals
noticed Google Sitelinks showing up for a site in the 60th position. At the
end of the thread, I noted that Googler JohnMu told the webmaster that he may
want to join the -60 penalty thread for more help. Yesterday, the Smackdown
blog picked it up and called this a warning shot from Google. He used this
message from JohnMu to explain that the -60 penalty is indeed a manual Google
penalty. See also:

YouTube Adds
"Discovery" Stats & Updates Page Design; Barry’s Search Video Podcast
- YouTube has announced the addition of a new statistic that can be found in
your video "YouTube Insights" section named "Discovery." Discovery is
basically a report showing you how people discovered and viewed your video, a
form of referral reporting. In addition, as TechCrunch reports, YouTube has
redesigned their video page. See also:

Gain Access To
Google’s Infrastructure With Google App Engine – Last night, at
Campfire One, Google launched an Amazon S3/EC2-like product named Google App
Engine. For non-techies, Google App Engine will allow you to host your web
sites and applications on their infrastructure. Not only that, this service
will automatically grow in resources and capacity, as your application or web
site requires. If you launch a web site and it spikes in traffic from being
mentioned on Oprah, Google App Engine (and products like it) will
automatically scale up to provide more server resources to handle that traffic
and usage. See also:

Interviewing
In-House SEO Candidates – With many in-house SEM teams ramping up, and
in-house efforts in general growing, I thought it might be useful to scope out
the basics for an SEO-centric interview. See also:

Your Site’s
Manifest Linking Destiny – One of the challenges link builders face is
pursuing links that will differentiate one site from competing sites in a way
that still produces a natural ILP (inbound link profile). Backlink forensics
is a method I use to see who already links to who, and part of that process,
perhaps the most important part, is determining why. See also:

Top Causes Of Errors
In Online Mapping Systems – Two years ago, my brother was getting
married, and he had asked me to help design his invitations and the maps
showing how to get from the church to the restaurant where we were holding the
rehearsal dinner. Despite
being very careful, I ended up making an incorrect map, sending a caravan of
cars containing tired, grumpy wedding participants off to the wrong place, and
my brother was ready to kill me. My experience in getting an erroneous map
from the web isn’t all that uncommon, and most avid internet users have been
tripped up at some point by errors found in online mapping systems. So, why do
these mapping errors happen so frequently? See also:

Yelp For
Business: New Tools Allowing Local Businesses To Speak For Themselves & More
- As the phenomenon of local business ratings and reviews becomes more
"institutionalized" and important, efforts are popping up to help businesses
cope and/or take advantage of the trend. Merchant Circle is one business in
the local space that has positioned itself as a platform for SMB "reputation
management" as well as marketing. Local search provider Yelp has now added
tools that make it easier for local businesses to communicate with reviewers
and to gain perspective on activity on their profiles. See also:

Leaving Las Yahoo:
Microsoft’s $5 Billion Mistake? – If Microsoft’s walkaway from the Yahoo
deal is indeed a ploy to save $5 billion, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer may have
proven himself pennywise and pound foolish. He was prepared to spend billions to
finally make Microsoft a serious rival to Google. For a bit more, he may have
destroyed Microsoft’s chance to get there. See also:

New Microsoft
Live Maps Roll Out With A Boatload Of Upgrades – A new version of
Microsoft’s Live Search Maps has rolled out (after yesterday’s major traffic
and routing upgrade). There’s an enormous range of feature and functionality
upgrades, which are explained in some detail on the Virtual Earth blog.
There’s also a discussion at CNET. At a crude level, what it means is that
Live Maps is now more visually rich and more "social" with third-party
content. See also:

More On
Microsoft Live Search News – Earlier we reported about the new
Microsoft Live Search News being launched. The Official Live Search blog has
posted about the revamp. Below are are more details about the service and how
it works. See also:

Secrets Of Paid
Search Success From 1930s Direct Mail Wizards – If you buy search ads
to drive sales, you are a direct response advertiser. Welcome, today’s short
column is for you. If you buy search to increase awareness of your brand,
you’re a brand advertiser. Sorry, but this column is for the direct response
gang, us red-headed step-kids of the advertising world. Save us a canapé from
the awards banquet; we’ll be back at the office with our spreadsheets. Just us
direct response folks? OK, here’s today’s suggestion: we search marketers can
learn a lot from the direct mail wizards. Putting it more crudely: if Claude
Hopkins were alive, his Google campaigns would kick ass. See also:

Ratings Service
Faceoff: Search Share Compared, June 2007 To March 2008 – I’ve now
compiled the latest search popularity stats from Hitwise, Compete, comScore,
and Nielsen Online. That means it’s time to put them all together once again,
to see what a "panel" of ratings services agree on — and don’t agree on — in
terms of search engine popularity. See also:

WWW2008: Search
Research Paper Roundup – A variety of interesting research papers on
search have come out of WWW2008, the 17th International World Wide Web
Conference. Some I’ve blogged already. Below is a rundown on those and some
other papers that may be of interest. For the attention-challenged, I’ve also
included my now patented "Twitter" summary for some of the interesting or more
accessible papers, to tell you the highlights. See also:

SMX Social: Just What
Did Calacanis Say About SEO & More Recaps – At our SMX Social Media
Marketing conference this week, we had a great panel on the future of human
powered search. Jason Calacanis of Mahalo, Jimmy Wales of Wikia Search, and
Steven Marder of Eurekster all took part. Jason had some remarks on SEO that
set off the usual wave of upset. But as I commented to those who weren’t at
the panel, by the end of Q&A, Jason — along with Jimmy Wales and Seven Marder
– were agreeing about the usefulness of SEO. It’s all down to the
definitions. See also:

Diagnosing The
SEO Health Of Your Website – Is your website sick? In many ways, SEO
consultants are like doctors, only instead of analyzing your personal health
symptoms, we analyze the overall health of your website. Once we diagnose what
the problems are, we can provide a "cure" that will make the website perform
better. In all
cases, a sick website is leaving money on the table. See also:

============================
Small Business============================

A Small Business
Marketing Success Story: John Tuggle, Guitar Teacher – A small business
can have millions of dollars in revenue and dozens of employees … or it can be
a one-man-band, turning passion into a living. This month’s small business
marketing success story is about the latter. Meet John W. Tuggle, a guitarist
living in Athens, Georgia. See also:

Facebook Adds
Lexicon And "Friend Feed" Style Outside Activity Alerts – Facebook
hasn’t yet added web search but it is allowing users to import content from
third-party sites. Users are now permitted to import stories and content (into
their mini-feeds) from a handful of sites: Flickr, Yelp, Picasa, and
del.icio.us to start with, Digg and others to come. The intention is to enable
people to do more on Facebook, without having to go "outside." In addition,
Facebook has launched what it calls "Lexicon," a successor to the shuttered
Pulse. Lexicon is like the Yahoo Buzz Index or Google Trends/Zeitgeist in a
way. See also:

US Court Learns
SEO, Decides META Keywords Don’t Matter – A court has ruled
that the META keywords tag is "immaterial." Goldman said this is the first
time the courts ruled based on knowledge of how the META keywords impact
search rank, as opposed to past cases such as National American Medical vs
Axiom, where a court ruled Meta Tags Can Constitute Infringement. See also:

Video SEO Can Give
Small Businesses An Edge – Many of us in the online video advertising
space have been encouraging small businesses to deploy video to stand out in
search results and level the playing field with larger competitors. Some
colleagues and I have been working with select clients to test, learn, test
again, and learn again from placing video in search and other distribution
points. The early learnings have been interesting and reinforced some tips
outlined further below. See also:

Yahoo Search
Circle Allows Users To Easily Expand & Narrow Results On Map – Yahoo
just announced that it has added a nifty tool to Local (called "search
circle") that allows uses to alter the geographic scope of results by
expanding or narrowing a circle on the map. The circle can also be dragged to
a particular area easily, allowing for more efficient neighborhood search
(screenshots below and on the Yahoo Local & Maps Blog). See also:

What Yahoo’s New
Minimum Bid Means To You – Yahoo recently announced that they are
moving away from a $0.10 fixed minimum CPC to a variable minimum bid. However,
there are some differences in how Yahoo calculates minimum bids compared to
AdWords. These differences are important to note as you switch between these
PPC engines so that each account is properly optimized for each engine
according to how the bids are calculated. See also:

Confirmed: Yahoo
To Test Google AdSense For Search Ads – Yahoo has confirmed a Wall
Street Journal report that it will be testing Google’s paid search ads alongside
its own for the next two weeks and involving no more than 3 percent of Yahoo’s
search pages in the United States. See also:

Yahoo Adds
SearchScan Alerts to "Risky" Search Results – Yahoo Search has begun a
partnership with McAfee, Inc. to provide SearchScan, which uses McAfee’s
SiteAdvisor technology to flag URLs it deems "risky" in the search results.
Results are flagged with the type of danger below the title. This new feature is
primarily aimed at preventing spyware and other malicious software from being
downloaded on searchers’ computers as well as at preventing searchers from
falling victim to sites that employ spammy email tactics. The Yahoo Search Blog
provides more information. Below, more details on what types of pages are
flagged and how site owners can dispute incorrect flagging. See also:

Yahoo Updates
Crawler: Introduces Yahoo Slurp 3.0 – Yahoo has announced the launch
of their new crawler, Yahoo! Slurp 3.0. 3.0 is slowly being pushed out over
the course of the "next several weeks," including "some infrastructure
updates," Yahoo said. I suspect the recent changes we reported with the Yahoo
Search Tax Day update is related to the "infrastructure updates." The new
spider will contain the same user-agent and all robots.txt directives, but
will be named "Slurp 3.0" as opposed to "Slurp 2.0." Yahoo notifies us to
expect two changes. See also:

Cinco Doh! Mayo:
Ask.com Spells Cinco de Mayo Wrong – If you take a look at the Ask.com
home page, you might notice a glaring typo on the Cinco de Mayo theme. Ask has
spelled ‘De’ as "Do.’ However, if you click through, Ask.com does link the
result to the correct spelling. See also:

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